i made a handcarved chess set out of sidewalk chalk and took a picture of it on a chess board also drawn with sidewalk chalk... cropped, resized, sharpened, added a border, adjusted the contrast, saturation and color time and made the colors a little more vibrant... also cloned out the line of the edge of the chessboard, so it blended with the black background, i darkened the background bit too to make the chess pieces pop, used cloning also to take out a few "chalk dust" spots on the board from moving the pieces around, and used it to clean up a few imperfections within the chalk itself. not sure what i'm going to do with my handcarved chess set now???
so there have been lots of questions about the carving of the chess pieces...i just used the big sidewalk chalk that comes in the round bucket (about 2 bucks at the craft store) and i had some wood carving tools that are super sharp that i never used before... i just held the chalk in my hand and started carving the pieces to look like a wooden set that i have. it didn't take that long, about 2 hours to do the whole set...the only piece that broke while i was carving is the cross of the top of the king, and i just carved another cross and attached it seperatley with a toothpick. it was super fun and much easier than i thought it would be to carve chalk... this was actually the first thing i've ever carved, i usually have issues with the 3d-ness of carving, i think starting with the round chalk and carving round pieces was a big help with the ease of this...but i was so very happy with how it turned out and getting a ribbon for it makes it that much better...thanks so much to everyone for all the wonderful comments and votes!!
wow...i just checked out the 1st and 3rd place... i feel so out of my league being surround by these guys....amazing images and i am honored to be between them!!
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Place: 1 out of 55 Avg (all users): 7.2422 Avg (commenters): 8.8750 Avg (participants): 6.7419 Avg (non-participants): 7.3615 Views since voting: 10274 Views during voting: 453 Votes: 161 Comments: 44 Favorites: 16 (view)
Not only is the craftmanship to be admired, but I really like that you chalked the board, too. And the lighting is perfect! I've enjoyed seeing this on the front page all week.
The mind boggles at the amount of time and patience and detail put into this shot. Wonderfully creative, and so glad it paid off for you! Congrats on the red!
Wow! What can I say? Fantastic image and so deserving of a ribbon. You put a lot of work into the making and I'm delighted for you that it did so well. Congratulations, Kelly!
Incredible work on the carving. Just out of curiosity, what kind of tools/technique did you use? Just holding a chalk in the hand and carving with some kind of knife, or something more specific? Also, I can imagine you broke an healthy amount of chalks before obtaining this result... Anyway, congratulations on the ribbon, very deserved!
Ok. Completely and totally, ridiculously amazing. Are these really and truly chalk? I was so impressed, I didn't notice, until my third viewing, that the game board was in chalk. Awesome!
(Would be difficult to play, however, too many colors! (or is it warm colors vs cool colors?) -8-
One of my three 10's. I love the work you put into this, even if you didn't do the carving it is still excellent. Great lighting, very nice depth of field and the title is great.
"Chalk"mate 
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